1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a machine for feeding and assembling seals to wires, for example single wire to electrical or fibre optic wires.
2. Summary of the Prior Art
Many electrical or optical connectors are provided with individual seals positioned around the wires for sealing such wires within a housing. Single wire seals are often assembled to the end of a wire prior to mounting of a terminal or ferrule to the wire end. Assembly of seals to wire ends thus often occurs in a harness-making-machine, as one of the processing steps in the manufacture of a harness.
Seals are typically made of elastomeric material, and they are inserted over the wire end by expanding the seals over a hollow tube within which the wire end is fed, subsequently pushing the seal off the tube onto the wire, and retracting the wire from the tube for further processing. In order to increase automation of the assembly procedure, the individual seals are sometimes mounted on a flexible support strip and fed as bandware to the seal insertion station. An alternative seal feeding method is to have a seal sorting station comprising a tumbling container and a feed track. Loose seals are tumbled by the tumbling container onto the vibrating track that captures the loose seals and feeds them to the seal insertion station. The latter procedure has the advantage of avoiding assembly of seals to a support strip thereby reducing costs and material waste.
Certain harness-making-machines have a modular construction where various processing stations such as crimping stations, wire end stripping stations and seal assembly stations are positioned in a juxtaposed manner, the type and number of stations depending on the complexity and level of automation required to manufacture a harness. In order to reduce space usage, cost and cycle time, it is advantageous to produce compact stations, in particular with regards to their width in the wire transporting direction, such that many stations can be positioned adjacent each other over a short distance. One of the problems with tumblers, is that the tumbling movement requires space, in particular a relatively large width in the wire transporting direction.
Many harness-making-machines transport wires to different stations by means of grippers holding the wire ends and fed by a conveyor or other transport system. At a processing station, the wire end is often moved to accomplish the processing operation. In order to increase simplicity of the conveying system that grips and feeds the wire ends, it is often more advantageous to reduce the amount of movement of the wire end thereby enabling provision of simpler grippers and faster cycle time.